More About Kara Walker
Shame on me--I need to go find my testicles. It's not complex at all, what Kara Walker is doing. Her audience is mostly white (or at least not primarily slave-descended African American), and she is focusing on something white people adamantly refuse to talk about. This critic-proofs her and titilates her audience, and gives her work a somewhat pornographic sensibility.
More later.
posted by fisher6000 at 4:57 PM
2 Comments:
"Critic-proof?" As if her work is a dead end? Or a one liner told over and over? For me, the work is great once, but the more of it I see, the more it just seems played out. Is this what you mean?
Thank god you are here. This is a really quick response because I am running late... but I am obsessed with why I can't write this review no matter how hard I try.
No. I actually agree with you about that sense that it's a dead end visually, mostly because it's so graphic. And yes, it's the same story told over and over again.
But no, that is not what I am talking about at all. The Met show is unique in that it bolsters her work up in a really interesting way. The historical stew gets thickened, her technical prowess becomes much more available. It's the most interesting looking Walker show I have seen in a long time.
But no, what she is doing is talking about the Great Historical Wrong (props to Kat) that keeps getting wedged in between black and white people. It makes discussion completely impossible.
IMO, (Kat and I are arguing about this right now), she *should* be talking about this pathological reliance on the legacy of slavery, because it's *the* big fat impediment and it's the one thing anybody can say or do about race that is truly dangerous--to really fuck with that legacy of slavery.
What is critic-proof about her is that she doesn't let anybody in to actually talk about it. It's a monologue, not a discussion. I would love it if she just threw out all the stuff at the Met (which paints a really rich picture of pain and the black subject in turmoil and the legacy of slavery and contemporary black rage based on this legacy of slavery) and didn't apologise for it, didn't tease white folks by saying she really thinks there can be a rebirth. She doesn't actually offer anything--she's just playing within this system of the Great Wrong when she does that.
But I think that if she just represented the rage and where it's based, in this legacy of slavery, without any twisting or bracketing, then we could have a discussion. I could say, as a viewer, something with integrity, like "I didn't enslave you and don't want to." Or "that sounds really painful" or "I can't possibly know what that feels like, but it was like 200 years ago and neither can you. We are more alike than you think."
Right now she is not allowing for any of that, and that causes me to edit the shit out of myself because she has so much power as the Eternal Victim. And I think that sucks.
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